[Python-Dev] FileCookieJars

[R. David Murray]

On Sat, 09 Mar 2013 12:13:54 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On 02/03/13 02:43, Demian Brecht wrote:
> > Cross-posting from python-ideas due to no response there. Perhaps it's
> > due to a general lack of usage/caring for cookiejar, but figured
> > /someone/'s got to have an opinion about my proposal ;)
> 
> Apparently not :-(
> 
> 
> > TL;DR: CookieJar > FileCookieJar > *CookieJar are architecturally
> > broken and this is an attempt to rectify that (and fix a couple bugs
> > along the way).
> [...]
> > This will obviously break backwards compatibility, so I'm not entirely
> > sure what best practice is around that: leave well enough alone even
> > though it might not make sense, keep the old implementations around
> > and deprecate them to be eventually replaced by the processors, or
> > other ideas?
> 
> I don't have an opinion on cookiejars per se, but I think that the first
> thing to do is get an idea of just how major a backward-compatibility
> breakage this would be. If you change the cookiejar architecture, then
> run the Python test suite, what happens? The number of failures will give
> you an idea of how bad it will be.
> 
> If there are no failures, you could consider just making the change. You
> probably should make an attempt to find out what third party apps use the
> cookiejars and see what they do.

To be clear, just passing the stdlib tests is *not* sufficient to think
that backward compatibility is not likely to be broken.  Deciding about
the likelihood of breakage is a hard problem, to which we generally
employ gut-level heuristics :) (And code search, as Steven suggests).

Since you say that it will "obviously" break backward compatibility, I'd
say that if we are going to do anything we'd have to think about how best
to introduce a more sane implementation and deprecate the old...and if we
are going to do that, we probably ought to spend a bit of time seeing if
there are any other open cookiejar issues we can tackle at the same time.

If, that is, you are interested enough to continue to be the point person
for this, which probably won't be a short process :)

The problem here is getting people interested, apparently :(

Since I start my Pycon diversion-from-work next week, maybe I can find
some time to take at least a preliminary look.

--David